


Cheers

by bwyn



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Love Confessions, M/M, New Year's Eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28576911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bwyn/pseuds/bwyn
Summary: “Okay, friends and family,” announces Lance, mispronouncing every consonant through numb lips. Pidge helpfully translates below and Lance gives her a cheeky thumbs up that she replies with a just as cheeky middle finger. “I will now show you something to whet your appetites for thrill before we get any fireworks.”A firecracker goes off in the distance. Keith points in its vague direction and Lance waves him off.“I, Lance Rivera, am about to jump off this roof.”“I SWEAR TO GOD,” says Allura quite calmly, “I WILL BREAK YOU IF THE GROUND DOESN’T.”
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 181
Collections: For all your Klance needs





	Cheers

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in an hour and change weeeee

The problem with an annual bucket list is that Lance is far too optimistic about accomplishing it, which comes with the territory of having completed progressively more difficult lists as the years went on. By his fifth year, he decides to do what he always deemed impossible.

Which is why, three hours before midnight on New Years Eve, Lance is clawing his way to the peak of his best frenemy’s brother’s partner’s rooftop. 

“Lance, get down!” snaps Allura for the tenth time.

For the tenth time, Lance says, “No!” except it comes out more like “N-n-n- _ugh_ -ow-no!” because despite the abundance of alcohol in his system, it’s still subzero, and he isn’t wearing gloves, or a hat, scarf, at least he has a sweater _—_

“When you get down from there, I’m going to wring your neck.”

“C-c-c-calm as alv-always, ‘Lura.”

The only reason he hasn’t slid down to submit himself to her alcohol-induced motherly rage is because of the man standing beside her. His best frenemy.

Honestly, fuck Keith, because Lance wouldn’t even _be_ competitive if it wasn’t for the guy beating him at a game of Galactica that became Cheat that became King’s Cup. Like, sure, can it really be counted as a win if they both end up hurling in the backyard at three in the morning because right from the get-go they took a simple glance as a challenge and a splash of beer turned into a shotglass full of rye for the cup? 

Fucking Keith.

“Get down from there,” says Keith with far less rage than Allura and a lot more of something else that Lance thinks might give him the edge he needs to finish his last bucket list task of the year.

“Hold on!”

“Holding.”

“Keith,” sighs Allura.

Lance doesn’t get to see him bow his head looking sufficiently cowed, but he knows it’s happening and he can’t help but giggle at the icy shingles, which he really thought wouldn’t be as bad as they are. His palms are all torn up and suffering and he’s got nothing to show for it— _yet_ , he helpfully reminds himself.

Finally at the peak and now with a larger crowd—Hunk from the doorway, phone in hand, waiting to call 911 like the best actual friend one could ask for—Lance rises to his feet. His knees quake like a newborn lamb’s. He’s definitely going to wipe out.

Which is kind of the point, but only in the loosest sense.

“Okay, friends and family,” announces Lance, mispronouncing every consonant through numb lips. Pidge helpfully translates below and Lance gives her a cheeky thumbs up that she replies with a just as cheeky middle finger. “I will now show you something to whet your appetites for thrill before we get any fireworks.”

A firecracker goes off in the distance. Keith points in its vague direction and Lance waves him off.

“I, Lance Rivera, am about to jump off this roof.”

“I SWEAR TO GOD,” says Allura quite calmly, “I WILL BREAK YOU IF THE GROUND DOESN’T.”

Truly astounding, the friendship they share.

“But not without a twist!” Lance continues, and, despite the tremble of his knees, he plants his feet more firmly on the slick roof. 

He’s not entirely an idiot—there’s a huge snowdrift packed down below—but he _does_ make the huge mistake of looking past Matt holding back Shiro from climbing up and Pidge with her disturbingly large DSLR out and Hunk slack with horror and Allura tying up her hair ominously—and instead looks to Keith.

Who gazes up at him with a smile that Lance knows because he’s seen it before: after Lance water skied on his bare feet and bailed hard, after chasing down and catching a gull barehanded and getting bird shit all down his chest, after blowing him a kiss just before getting launched upside down on a bungee jump.

A twisted mouth, bunched up like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or yell in anger, but eyes wide and fixed regardless of his trepidation. 

And Lance knows he’s already fucking lost, but he’s up here and by god he isn’t going to regret not pulling out all the stops (whispers his delightedly alcohol-addled brain).

So he tips his socked feet against the edge of the roof’s peak and launches himself with all the energy left in his cold legs. The world spins around him. This is so much cooler than a triple backflip off the highest diving platform at the pool. 

The landing hurts a lot more, though.

“You’re a fucking _idiot_ ,” screams Allura, all muffled.

“He nailed it though,” says Pidge, equally muffled.

“Nailed his head, you mean!”

Lance can’t help but snort, a little shaken and a lot buried in some pounds of chilly fluff that someone is busily digging him out of. He sees sky eventually, though it’s upside down—as is Keith’s face.

He’s smiling, though, so Lance will take that as a slight win.

“Hey there,” says Keith, pulling Lance upright. “That was stupid.”

And Lance deflates, smile slipping right off his face, because he knows but he wanted to hope anyway. 

“God _damnit.”_

Keith reels back, blinking rapidly. There’s all kinds of chaos behind him, mostly to do with holding Allura back, that for a moment it’s just Keith knee deep in snow and Lance sitting upon a broken throne of his own making.

“I mean, it was cool enough?” adds Keith with uncertainty.

“But it didn’t _impress_ you,” whines Lance, kicking his heels at the snow. It should be concerning he doesn’t feel it.

Keith cocks an eyebrow. “Uh. I mean. Sure it did? You nearly did two whole rotations.”

“ _Fuck!_ I thought I did three!” Lance flops back and sighs. “Fuck. I really thought I was gonna make it this year. Five for five, y’know.”

Keith doesn’t move except for the tilt of his head. “Five for five? You mean your yearly bucket list?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah.” Keith looks up at the roof and hums thoughtfully. “Well. Y’know. If a triple backflip was all you were going for, I’m sure I could get up there and give you a boost. After you warm up.”

“That’s not the point,” grumbles Lance, even though Keith’s willingness—sincere or not—to help him warms him from his toes to his crown. Metaphorically, since his nerves are definitely out of commission. And, because his filter is broken from rum and rye and a beer or three and nearly two rotations off Keith’s brother’s partner’s roof, he says, “My last goal was to impress _you_.”

“Huh?”

Lance flips an arm over his eyes with another dramatic groan. “I got all cocky ‘cause I nailed the last four years, right? And I was like, what’s the point if it’s _easy_ so I thought up an impossible task. One that’s like, not actually impossible but only in theory because I’ve never done it, right? Nothing to go off of. So. Impress you. That was my last goal.” Lance flings his arm into the snow drift. “And I flubbed it.”

The sudden exposure of his eyes to the twinkling blur of the house decor is a lot—piercing, really, maybe he has a concussion—so it takes Lance a moment to focus back on Keith’s face, flushed from the cold. Who gave him the right to be so pre— 

“—tty. Devastatingly.”

Keith’s face goes even redder. _Hell._

“Please, god above, tell me I didn’t say that outloud,” Lance says, the picture of serene even as his gut positively explodes, and not in the unpleasant _drank too much trying to impress his crush_ way but _just called his arch frenemy/frival/what have you/crush devastatingly pretty after years of backhanded compliments_.

Keith fake-coughs. “Uh.”

Lance starts to his feet, failing spectacularly in every way as Keith just looks on. “Allura promised me a swift death,” says Lance.

“She didn’t, actually. Anyway, then I wouldn’t get to hear anymore.”

“Literally fuck right off.”

“Hell no. Call me pretty again.”

Lance stops trying to get up and instead settles for kicking Keith in the shin. “Shut.”

And the way Keith laughs, all stupid and pretty, tells Lance there’s nothing to be afraid of. He might have fucked up extravagantly but at least Keith is good enough to turn it into a joke. It’s one of the reasons Lance likes him so much.

“You’re embarrassing,” says Keith, ignoring Lance’s hands that feebly gesture for help to pull him up, instead plunking himself a seat in the snow beside him. Apparently at some point the onlookers had gone back inside. Suspicious, Lance thinks. “But y’know, you already accomplished that goal.”

Lance is fairly certain butterflies migrate and therefore shouldn’t be hosting a New Years Eve party of their own in his belly. He scowls. “Don’t try to give me a fake win, Keith, you know I hate that.”

“Only when it comes to me,” says Keith with a nod. “You’re constantly cheating at Crazy Eights against Pidge.”

“You think she isn’t cheating too? Don’t be naïve, Keith! She’s a monster!”

Keith lets out a fondly exasperated laugh. “Lance, I’m not giving you a fake win.”

“You are.”

“Am not.”

“Are _too_ ,” says Lance petulantly before clamping his mouth shut, eyes narrowed at Keith’s smile. His eyes narrow further when Keith starts taking off his gloves and shoves them onto Lance’s numb hands, and his scarf to wrap around Lance’s neck, and he’s about to take off his shoes but they’re Matt’s Birkenstocks and Keith’s feet must be numb as all hell too.

“You know,” Keith says as he tucks the excess scarf around Lance’s arms, “when I wouldn’t let you live down that picture Pidge took of you after you wiped out? Water skiing? On your bare feet?”

“Fudge you too.”

“How about when you grabbed that seagull out of the sky?”

“And you laughed for ten minutes about the shit.”

Keith’s mouth twitches. “Or when you did the bungee jump upside down? Couldn’t get out of the sand pit we dug at the beach? Tried to nail all the parts in a Pentatonix song?”

Lance practically hisses out a sigh. He remembers Keith laughing after _all_ these things, that were supposed to impress him, not make him laugh—even if it did sort of make it worth it, if only to see Keith in joyful tears because of him.

“Lance,” says Keith with laughter in his voice just at the memory of them all, “you’re the coolest. I mean that. Absolutely nobody is cooler than you when you’re doing the wildest shit because—Christ, _I_ sure as hell wouldn’t do it, because I don’t do the shit I don’t think I can. But you do, you try it all, and that’s—”

Keith breaks off, lips pursed around a laugh—or something else. Lance’s heart is drumming a violent beat in his chest. He can’t help but stare, wide-eyed and disbelieving.

“You’ve gotta know,” Keith says, and Lance doesn’t know, not at all, and it must show on his face because Keith is doing that grimace he does like Lance is being particularly dense. “Lance, it’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to you. Just one of them. There’s more, but unlike you, I haven’t had enough to drink to really get into that and I—”

“Make a bucket list,” interrupts Lance, breath coming out way too fast. Keith blinks at him, startled, and Lance goes on, “Right now. Before the year is up. Something you don’t think you’d be able to do unless there’s a deadline. Something you can’t put off otherwise.”

Keith looks between his eyes, which must be as openly frantic as Lance is feeling right now. Even the cold can’t numb _that_. He can’t believe they’re doing this just before midnight—except he can. Wouldn’t that be just like them?

“Nobody says they’re drawn to someone else,” Lance persists, “unless they’re in a movie with a magical subplot, or they mean something else. Just one thing. I’ll even make it up for you. Just—” He hesitates at Keith’s expression, on the cusp of frightened in a way that Lance doesn’t think he deserves. “Just. Tell me. One thing you didn’t want me to know an hour ago.”

By god, Lance refuses to start off the new year with anything less than a boyfriend. 

“You said that out loud,” says Keith faintly.

“I sure did. I added it to my bucket list. You really gonna make me sit out here, dying from hypothermia, without that? Are you that cruel?”

Keith splutters out a laugh. “Your mouth isn’t one of the reasons I like you.”

“Liar,” says Lance, steady despite the pounding of his heart. “Can I count that?”

“No.” Keith laughs again at Lance’s pout, like if he laughs long enough and hard enough Lance will just let it slide. Keith stifles the last of his giggle under a bitten lip. His smile is infectious, Lance mirroring it before Keith even says, “I like you” and “Have for a long time” and “Ever since we first met, when you got the high score on Pac-Man at the arcade and I thought it was the coolest shit I’d ever seen.”

“ _That_ impressed you?” protests Lance, incredulous and elated. 

“Yeah.” Keith smiles, painfully fond. “It really did.”

Lance stares at him. “Raise your bar.”

Keith’s smile widens—”If you say so”—and Lance feels, as if his lips had never been numb in the first place, Keith’s laugh against his own mouth. Happy, like him; trembling, like him. 

Incredulous and resigned, like him, that this is how they come together, and that only makes their shivering laughs and missed kisses all the more funny.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> anyway happy new year!! (´꒳`)


End file.
